Finger info for icculus@icculus.org...

Duke3D: Still need to get Bargle's console and such into the icculus.org CVS, but everyone is stretched too thin to do so at the moment. We'll get it there soon. Not counting the Mac port, we're really just about done with everything we wanted to do with Duke3D.

Devastation: Server is out. Details here. Beta 1 of the Linux client is avaiable. Get it.

Serious Sam: The First Encounter: Beta three is out. The Second Encounter is now available, too! Details are here. Time to work on ssam is non-existant, and there will probably not be another build for Linux for the foreseeable future, if ever.

Unreal Tournament 2003: The Mac demo is out! Go find a mirror. It's about 135 megs. Reviews on the various forums are good...and to my surprise, people are reporting acceptable performance on machines I would have considered vastly underpowered! There's one guy swearing he's getting 20 fps on a 400MHz machine. If you are hesistating because you are under the minimum specs but have some bandwidth to spare, it might be worth checking it out just in case.

America's Army: We showed ArmyOps on the Mac...to demonstrate that it was network compatible with the Windows and Linux players, we showed off 1.7.0 (the latest public version). I'll be updating it to match all the cool nextgen stuff that the rest of the systems were showing, and then we'll stay in sync for each public patch.

Gentoo's got a LiveCD version of the game (like they did with the Linux version of UT2003), and this is currently the only way to play it on Linux...we'll be releasing a public Linux cient shortly, but I'm considering this a "Gentoo Games exclusive" for a few days, so if you want it, go get a BitTorrent for it.

Other stuff: E3 is wrapping up for me. I totally managed to miss half the people I wanted to meet with or spend more time talking to (sorry Connie, Bargle, the ex-Loki crew, etc...), but a lot of good business got done while I was there, and I got to skip the four hour wait to see Half Life 2 and got an early showing of the Matrix Reloaded, too. It's all who you know, I swear.

So I'm camped out in my hotel room waiting to go to the airport, and I'm reading all sorts of internet forums. Thus far, Inside Mac Games called me a homeless person with things living in my hair (which, by the way, wasn't funny), and I'm finding tons of people who think that not playing America's Army on the Mac will be a brilliant way to protest America's military action in Iraq. That'll show them, no doubt.

Furthermore, I'm a little nervous about all the posts that say "hey, ut2004 is being worked on, I think I'll skip ut2003 and wait for ut2004 instead." This is twice as surprising after I mull over all the hate mail I got about how torturous the wait for ut2003/mac was, how Epic is in bed with Microsoft, etc.

Let me be clear about this: Do Not Assume You Are Getting UT2004.

If you are a mac gamer, and you want more games on the mac, now is the time to control your own destiny. If ut2003 doesn't sell well, not only is it likely that Epic will lose interest in the Mac as a market, but so will other developers. You can bet your ass everyone is watching to see what happens...ut2003 pushes the Mac in ways that other games haven't to date, but it's hardware requirements are very rapidly becoming the norm in the game market...developers and publishers want to see:

1) if Mac hardware can keep up. I'm not talking about the shiny new stuff like the 1.4GHz towers, either. If developers and publishers feel that only (say) 10% of Macs that have been sold can even run their game, the market is not viable. 2) if Mac gamers will buy it. Yes, that sounds like an oversimplification, but for many gameshops, this is the bottom line: How Many Units Can We Move? The Mac community needs to be able to say, "We moved X units of UT2003 and have Y active Mac players in ArmyOps" where "X" and "Y" are big goddamn numbers, without qualifiers such as, "But it would have been bigger if everyone didn't wait for ut2004" and "But it would have been bigger if people didn't consider the game a political statement".

UT2004 is months and months away. I know there was 400,000+ downloads of the ut2003 mac demo, but the way to vote is to buy the real game so that gameshops are willing to keep talking about Mac ports. Let me repeat: if you want to see new Unreal games on the Mac, Do Not Wait For UT2004.

Usual disclaimer: I speak for me, not Epic or their licensees. But you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

--ryan.

When this .plan was written: 2003-05-16 13:40:19
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